Manny wasn’t entirely mollified. “We went down to the surface on Avalon.”
“Avalon was different, that trip down was on a scheduled commercial spaceplane, and this ship stopped at Avalon for over a week. Here, by the time we get over to the station, transfer to a plane, and fly down, the ship will have left.”
“Still, I wish we could go down to the surface.” Manny said with a sigh as he slumped against the viewport. “It looks soooooo cool, Dad.”
“You’re right, it does.” Both of the male Sanchezes leaned forward, pressing their foreheads into the large viewport, leaning forward to look down at the world slowly rolling by beneath their feet. Oceania, true to its name, was mostly ocean, no continents to speak of. It was almost entirely blue, the kind of brilliant, Caribbean blue that looks like something faked up for a picture, until you see it in person. Chains of large and small islands dotted the globe, the planet was a beach lover’s paradise, which is exactly what the planetary development company was counting on. The scattered islands did not make the planet practical for supporting industry, or a large population, so the company had been promoting the world as a vacation and retirement destination. Look at all the beautiful beachfront property, the ads extolled! Only 325 lightyears from Earth! Pre-construction pricing still available! Truth to tell, both Rick and Joy were tempted to plop down a deposit on a beachfront lot, supposedly as an investment. Too bad their limited funds didn’t allow such indulgences.
Rick had seen the pictures, and now he saw it with his own eyes. There was one island directly below the ship, it had a lush green interior, and was surrounded by a strip of white that had to be perfect, sandy beaches. Beyond the beach was a ring just below the surface, Rick assumed it was a sort of coral reef. He sighed without realizing it. Manny was entirely correct for whining about not going to down to that paradise. Rick stared and stared at the island, imagining he could feel a warm, tropical breeze on his skin, imagining his family was there, rather than stuck aboard a transport, in the coldness of space.
While father and son watched, feeling the icy cold of hard vacuum bleeding through the viewport and cooling their foreheads, a sleek spaceplane detached from the space station, flipped gracefully end over end, and fired its main engines in a deorbit burn maneuver. When the freighter had left Earth, all twenty passenger cabins had been full, now the Sanchezes were the only passengers. Most people had left the ship at the first stop, the planet Avalon, and only one elderly couple had gotten aboard there for the trip to Oceania, Rick supposed they were aboard the spaceplane he was watching. The other one of Oceania’s two passenger-carrying spaceplanes had come and gone that morning, all that kept Atlas Challenger from breaking orbit was one last load of cargo, which would soon be aboard. Rick and his son watched the spaceplane, standing side by side, in silence. Rick thought it was great. All too soon, he figured, his son would be a sullen teenager, and silence would be the response to anything Rick said or asked. He wanted to drink in the moment, so he could remember it later, remember it always. Manny had often talked about being a space pilot. At least, he had recently. Before that, there had been potential career paths as a pro football player, a fireman, and, early on, an archeologist, just like his father.
Eventually the spaceplane disappeared out of view, falling around the horizon on its long curving path down to the surface. “Going, going... gone!” Manny said as the last, bright glint of light from the spaceplane went out of sight.
“Hey, I wonder what sort of cargo we’re taking aboard here. You think Ms. Tanner will let us see?” Rick suggested as another distraction. The children had been remarkably good to date, he was anxious to avoid a meltdown. Once they departed Oceania, there were no stops until they reached Valhalla, another month and a half cooped up in the freighter. Six weeks, inside a box in the bleak coldness of hyperspace.
“Yeah!” Manny answered enthusiastically. Specialist Second Class Jennifer Tanner had taken a liking to the Sanchez children, and Manny openly had a crush on the pretty young woman. Rick thought he could appeal to Jen to let them observe the cargo loading from the windows overlooking the shuttle bay.
“Okay! Let’s get your mother and your sister, and see if we can contact Jen.”
Jen was reluctant at first, there were regulations against passengers being in the cargo sections of the ship, although she had brought the children along before. That had been during the uneventful cruise in hyperspace, when the Captain was unlikely to be roaming the cavernous cargo holds. Now, as usual during a loading exercise, Schroeder was supervising directly. Kaylee pouted, until Jen relented, and agreed they could watch the cargo go by, in one of the wide access corridors between the shuttle bay and the cargo hold, while Schroeder was busy elsewhere. The deal Jen made with Rick was that the children needed to keep out of the way, and out of sight if possible. Joy had elected not to join them, figuring this would be quality father-children bonding time.
Kaylee and Manny were very excited, and on their best behavior, without even being reminded. Jen had enlisted a co-conspirator, a man who was normally the ship’s navigator-pilot, Sethandra Putri. Everyone called him ‘Seth’. He liked the children, mostly in small doses. Since Seth’s duty station was on the bridge, they didn’t see him often, and that appeared to be just fine with Seth.
The cargo came in from the shuttle landing bay on robotic pallets, all Jen and Seth needed to do was guide the pallets to their destination in the various cargo bays. There were three pallets, two of them held one large cryostorage tank each, which contained live animals in deep sleep storage. It was not unusual for alien animals to be purchased for zoos on Earth, the crew had dealt with them many times.
“Watch this, kids.” Seth pulled a rag out of his back pocket and started wiping the thin layer of condensation off the clear cover of the cryosleep tank.
“Seth, I don’t think this is a good-“ Jen started to say.
“Aw, it’s fine. What could it hurt? Besides, aren’t you curious?” The pilot asked.
Jen, after a moment’s hesitation, nodded. “Yeah, kinda.” She waved the children forward, and they all crowded around the tank’s cover.
Seth wiped away the water vapor, and shone a light inside the tank. It was a frightening sight. The animal was roughly the size of a tiger, clearly a predator, based on the claws on the ends of its four paws, and the large, sharp teeth visible in its half-open mouth. Unlike a tiger, it had no fur, instead it was covered in plates of thick, tough, leathery armor. The plates were especially large and thick on its chest, and around its front shoulders. The skin was a mottled grey-green, with dark grey stripes. Rick shuddered, reminding himself that field archeology sometimes meant facing animals like this, and worse. “What’s it called?”
Seth checked the cargo manifest. “I dunno. It’s got some long darned Latin scientific name I can’t pronounce. This thing looks like a cross between a rhino and a tiger to me.”
“A Tino. That’s what I would call it.” Kaylee suggested.
“Yeah. Tino. I like it.” Seth made a notation on the manifest. “Tell you what, kiddo, you just named the beast. When this container gets opened on Earth, the label’s gonna read ‘Tino’.”
“Really? Cool!” Kaylee beamed with delight.
“Can I name one?” Manny asked excitedly.
“Well, there’s other animals, but they’re already in storage. Another day, OK?” Jen made a mental note to take the children down to see the cryosleep compartment.
Kaylee put her face up close to the clear cover. “Tino, huh? Sure is mean looking.”
Manny crowded in with her to get a better look. A thin, clear tube ran into a patch on the tino’s neck, in between armor plates. Through the tube dripped drugs and nutrients which kept the animal alive, asleep, and safely in suspended hibernation. “Kaylee, that is really cool that you named it.”
Kaylee shot a glance silence at her brother out of the corner of her eye. Was he teasing her? No. The little creep was serious this time. He w
as OK sometimes. “Thanks, Manny.” She whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” Manny asked.
Kaylee looked at the curving, yellowish teeth of the tino, and turned toward her brother. “I don’t want to wake it up, so you?”
Just then, Seth jostled the tank and roared at the same time, making it look like the animal was awake and moving. The two children, along with Jen and Rick, jumped back.
“Very funny, Seth!” Jen said, annoyed. “Show’s over, let’s get this stowed away. What else we got?”
Seth grinned, pulled the next pallet forward and scanned the label. “Hey, professor, you’ll be interested in this one,“ Seth said as he read the label, “some kind of alien artifacts. Funny, though, they weren’t originally labeled that way at first. Must have caught it at the space station Customs office.”
Rick frowned. “Probably somebody trying to get around the export restrictions. Where’s it going to?”
“Earth. Some company called Concordia Planetary. Looks like they’re acting as a forwarding agent for somebody else.”
“Never heard of Concordia.” Which was odd, there weren’t many non-governmental organizations that were allowed to handle alien artifacts. Officially, at least. Rick knew there was a substantial black market; the paper he wrote for his doctoral thesis had been helped, in part, by a private collector letting him examine an artifact, with the agreement that Rick keep his mouth shut about where he saw the items. What really didn’t make sense was shipping such valuable items on a slow freighter like Atlas Challenger. The ship had several stops to make on the way back to Earth... unless cargo aboard a faster ship would attract more attention? Or the buyer didn’t think the items were important? That was the problem with most alien artifacts, other than the fact that they were alien and ancient, they were worthless junk, of no practical value. Rick mentally shrugged. Oceania’s few, small sites of alien ruins had been studied pretty thoroughly, the current theory was that Oceania never had more than a short-term alien science station, never a permanent settlement. The aliens hadn’t liked sitting on a beautiful beach, sipping pina coladas, he guessed? Whatever was in the boxes, it couldn’t be very important.
Rick realized Seth was looking at him and waiting for him to say something. “There’s one, two, three, uh, seven boxes here, you want to report this as contraband? The space station has a government Customs officer aboard.” Seth suggested.
“Nah, it can’t be anything important. I don’t want to hold up our departure time, make the Captain mad at me.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that, Captain don’t like contraband. Universal Transport don’t like problems, Captain keeps them out of trouble.” Seth concluded.
“Seth, seriously, I’m sure it’s junk destined for some collector’s library back home. If it was anything significant, it would have been impounded at the station.”
“Dad, it’s real alien stuff, though? Can’t we look at it?” Kaylee asked.
“Yeah, Dad, you’re the expert,” Manny added, “you should look at it.”
“Kids, those boxes are sealed for transport, we can’t open them. Sorry.” Rick concluded. “Trust me, we’ll see much cooler alien stuff on Valhalla, stuff that no human has ever seen before.” He added hopefully, and waved a hand at the pallet dismissively. “Not this leftover junk.”
CHAPTER 3
After Oceania, all the pleasant distractions were gone. No other passengers. The Beach was empty. Star travel was endless and dull and boring. Schoolwork sucked. There was nothing to do aboard the ship. Mother and father tried to find something, anything, to occupy Kaylee and Manny.
After a particularly trying morning, when Kaylee had been grumpy at breakfast, and then stomped off to mope in her room, Joy brought her husband a cup of coffee, and announced "Our daughter is going to drive me crazy. She's bored out of her mind, and she hates everything."
"Honey, it's not just this boring trip." Rick said gently. "Manny is just as bored, but he's dealing with it, because he's excited that we're going to a new planet. Kaylee hates the idea of going to Valhalla even more now than she did when we left Earth. Valhalla is still a primitive place. The aliens modified the climate when they occupied it, then the planet partially reverted to its natural state, now we're terraforming it and that process isn't complete." After the aliens mysteriously disappeared and stopped maintaining the biosphere they had artificially created on Valhalla, the planet's climate had radically swung from one extreme to another over thousands of years, with the current state being widespread deserts. The human terraforming project had raised oxygen levels to eighteen percent, which was lower than Earth normal but breathable. Dropping ice-filled comets into the atmosphere had helped refill the ocean basins and bring much-needed rains to the continents, and the project was on time and on target to eventually make the planet into the paradise the development company promised. Until the project was complete, people living there had to endure unpredictable weather, occasional supersonic shockwave winds from strings of comets slamming into the atmosphere, and isolation from most of the human community. Valhalla held a population of only three thousand people, scattered across an entire planet. The settlement where the Sanchez family would be living had three hundred fifty people, with only thirty of them being children. Rick would be away working on excavating alien ruins part of the time, and while Joy's job allowed her to be near home most of the time, she would have to travel several times a year. The parents planned to coordinate their schedules so at least one of then was always with the children, rather than rely on the company-provided child care. And both parents hoped to take the children with them on field trips on school breaks. Manny was dying to explore alien ruins, and Rick was sure Kaylee would also be interested, when she actually saw the ruins of an ancient alien city. "Valhalla is great for us, for our professional passions. I get to investigate alien ruins that no one has seen before instead of stuff sent to Earth in a box. You get to do exobiology where all the biology is 'exo', even the modified organisms we planted there. For Manny, it will all be a grand adventure, playing pioneer in a frontier settlement. For Kaylee, it will mean living in a prefabricated box instead of a nice house, going to a new school, not knowing whether she'll make any friends."
"So what do we do?"
"You're asking me?" Rick shrugged. "I have cabin fever too, being cooped up on this ship. The crew spends most of their year in this tin can, I'll ask them for suggestions on how to cope with it."
The starship crew, after pleading from Joy and Rick, helped rescue the children from their hopeless boredom. It started with Jen offering to let first Kaylee, then both children, accompany her on her maintenance inspection rounds, into areas of the ship that were officially off-limits to passengers. Jen told them that the crew didn’t refer to their ship as Atlas Challenger, but by its nickname “A.C.”, pronounced “Ace”. Also, Jen told them that all cargo ships owned by Universal Transport were named Atlas C-something, like Atlas Champion, Atlas Charger, Atlas Capital and fifteen other names. The crews referred to themselves as ‘Aces’, that was why the crew uniforms had logos in the form of a playing card: an Ace of diamonds. It made Manny feel cool to call the ship Ace in front of his parents, one night at dinner. Initially, the excursions around the ship with Jen were no big deal, staying within the aft part of the oval-shaped command section that was attached to the front of the ship, forward of the four long, boxy cargo pods. Just getting out of the passenger section, which took up the front of one cargo pod, and into the command section, was exciting enough. Jen could not actually take them onto the ship’s bridge, of course. The best she could do was to allow them to peek their heads in the doorway, late one afternoon, when she was sure only Seth was on duty.
Seeing the ship’s bridge was a big build-up to a huge disappointment. The starship’s control center was nothing special, lots of computer display screens, although everything seemed to be well-worn, and about a generation behind current technology. Seth had been sitting in a chair
, sipping tea, looking thoroughly bored. All in all, Atlas Challenger’s bridge was nothing like the fictional starship control centers shown on popular video programs. The children realized the command section’s crew quarters were no different, and generally more cramped, than the cabin their family had been assigned.
Things got more interesting when Jen took Kaylee and Manny along on trips into the cavernous cargo sections, each of which was over a kilometer long. Walking the considerable length of the ship did impress the two young people, and every time they went, they saw something different, so large was the ship. They saw the compartment where the cryosleep boxes held the tinos, that became a favorite place to visit. After the first two days, Jen let the sister and brother navigate their way through the cargo compartments, she would tell them where she needed to go, and either Kaylee or Manny would go first, figuring out which lefts and rights to take, when to climb up or down. The process was not fast, as Jen had to use her access card to open many airtight doors along the way. Unlike during cargo loading operations, when all the doors in a cargo section would be open to facilitate movement of the robotic cargo-handling pallets, the doors remained closed while the ship was in flight. Jen explained that using doors to separate the cargo sections into airtight compartments was a precaution against loss of air during an accident. There was no repeat of what the Sanchezes had briefly seen during cargo loading at Oceania: the entire length of a cargo section, with all the doors open, stretching over a kilometer back toward the fusion engines and hyperdrive.
The days crawled along slowly, with schoolwork, family dinners, reading, watching videos, going to the Beach, playing games, and spending time with Jen. Only another two weeks, and the ship would finally arrive at Valhalla, where the bulk of its cargo would be unloaded, the Sanchez family would say goodbye to the crew, and begin their new life. And everyone aboard could not wait for those two weeks to be gone.
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